THE other day it hit me. While traveling in Highway #1, from Caguas to RIO or vice versa. Concrete craters, sinking plates, plastered with asphalt.
What made the epiphany shocking is the familiarity of the whole moonscape in highways, roads, side walks down here.
This familiarity is consequence of watching these permanent holes, craters in the same areas only getting worse, part of the hardscape, for 45 years they have never been repaired, or recognized, acknowledged. I will be 60 in 2011.
Imagine traveling in this uneven surface, in vans typical of India or Africa, no refrigerated air, a radio blasting, 16/18 passengers in a vehicle for 12, the collective, stupid monologues of these sad people, the smell of Varon Dandy, English Leather or plain sweat in the old heat.
That is the way people used to travel, before every joe six pack or pancho karaekeso was able to buy a car. That is how this window glass of democracy became one of those places on earth with one car for every two people in our geographic 100 long X35 wide dirty and noisy concrete hell.
The old heat? Forty five years ago, Puerto Rico was mostly vegetation, now it is about one third of pure concrete/asphalt, single mothers in housing projects or with Section VIII.
The heat is permanent day and night, even in our winter, thanks to concrete heat absorption/refraction.
Driving, that feeling of freedom, of being able to go anywhere, as in those advertisements from the auto industry from USA, when it was powerful, or now Japan, Korea or Germany, a bitter joke a la George Carlin.
A nice, shiny car, with sport wheels, air,
500 watt stereo, from 0 to 60 in 10 or 4, what difference with the shitty roads down here? Only the retarded, abundant in all economic segments buys BM, Mercedes, Audis or worse a Lotus, for what? To feel the bumbs, navigating yatch like, the flooded streets, highways and roads at every little rain here?
Somos unos pobres ilusos, verdad?
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